GameFly Launches Movie Rental Business

GameFly, the video game rental service provider, has decided to move into Netflix territory by introducing a new movie rental business which ought to prove to be a worthy competitor to Netflix’s disc-by-mail business, although that remains to be established. I suppose giving them some time to do so would help, so we will have to be patient in this particular case. GameFly started to notify its existing customers concerning this particular service over email, at least according to a post on NeoGAF. Right now, this movie rental business is in beta mode, where the service has DVDs as well as Blu-ray discs on offer to those subscribers. Similar to its game rentals, subscribers will be able make a request for either one or two movies at any one time, and there is no need to start a separate account. That is a good thing, since it means one less username and password to remember.

Right now, GameFly’s game rental service does share a rather identical distribution model, and they already have both warehouse and shipping infrastructure in place, so to replicate that with a movie rental service should not be too difficult to handle. Not only that, many of the companies involved in the rent-by-mail market have shifted plenty of focus to streaming video, so GameFly might actually carve out a niche for themselves. What do you think?